Q and A: Do you really need to hide optimization from Google?

Dear Kalena...

What do you think of this article by Jill Whalen? This goes against everything I’ve learned; you need to SEO your sites but “under the Google radar” so that they don’t think you are SEOing but optimized your site by accident?

What’s a SEOer to do?

Thanks,
Reid

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Reid

I've known Jill a long time and I get where she's coming from. Basically, she means you shouldn't follow a particular formula for optimizing web sites. There are no strict rules, don't get bogged down counting keywords or the number of characters in your META Descriptions. Don't stress about having keywords in your ALT IMG attributes or using H1 tags on every page. Just improve the compatibility of your pages with searchers and visitors.

I don't agree with her idea that Google may penalize any sites they think are optimized, but I do agree that Google probably looks for over-optimized sites, especially those that use keywords in their domain names and things like that. I also agree with this statement:

"If you've done it right, an everyday user should not have any idea that a page has been SEO'd."

It's quite true - a beautifully optimized and copywritten web site should no show obvious signs that it has been SEO'd. As I say in the SEO courses I teach, I don't recommend you obsess about keyword density or backwards engineering the search algorithms. Just design and optimize a web page with your visitors in mind and the rankings will usually follow.


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